Tuesday, October 30, 2012

From Hugh Houghton:The Eighth Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament will be held in Birmingham from 4-6 March 2013.

The general theme is "The Tradition of the New Testament: Treasures New and Old".

Proposals are invited for papers of around 20 minutes. (It may also be possible to accommodate longer presentations.) Suggestions for workshops, presenting work in progress, are also welcome. Titles and short abstracts should be sent to H.A.G. Houghton by the end of December 2012 (all submissions will be acknowledged).

A provisional programme and booking form will be made available in early 2013.

David Parker and Hugh Houghton
Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion University of Birmingham www.birmingham.ac.uk/itsee

Brice Jones (The Quaternion) has identified a Galatians (2:2-4, 5-6) manuscript for sale on eBay, here. I am going to make sure we archive the image here in Münster. Thanks, Brice! I have to disagree with Jones, Suciu and Choat on what Brice qualifies as a "likely" dating of the papyrus. Correctly, one could argue that our datable 4th-5th century Coptic codices have documentary qualities such as this, but the inverse assumption is dangerous and factually untenable. In other words, we should not assume that all Coptic codices from later centuries must resemble those high-quality monastic codices of Sohag, Hamuli and Saqqara, and that no later codices were written with documentary qualities. I am hoping that younger scholars will be conservative than previous generations, and will avoid dating Coptic (and Greek) manuscripts to the 4th-5th centuries just because they are ugly and written on papyrus. I would need to examine further samples, but epsilon and kappa have traits here that may reflect Alexandrian majuscule influence -- indicating a likely date later than the 6th century (contra alpha, which is clearly following a Biblical majuscule style).

Could this be a writing exercise? Consider the spelling anomalies which Brice mentions, and I note also the spelling ⲧⲉ which has been corrected to ⲇⲉ. The ductus suggests documentary qualities (epsilon's horizontal stroke, position of tau, eta written with one continuous stroke).

With regard to the Turkish seller, I have been wondering if this is the source for the Green foundation papyri.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Rick Brannan (ricoblog) has reviewed The Early Text of the New Testament (eds. Hill & Kruger; OUP 2012) in several blogposts, bit by bit. In his final post (which has links to all previous parts) he wraps it up:

I can’t say it enough: This book really is awesome; I only hope the publisher is able to release a more affordable paperback copy so more folks can use the book. It is that useful if you’re working through the text of a passage and want to take significant variants from early manuscripts (pre 5th century) into account. . . .

For this task, Part II, “The Manuscript Tradition” is really the gem within the book (TOC for Part II is given in a previous post). While each article approaches the task differently, what you end up with is basically a focused discussion of the variations found in early manuscripts (mostly papyri) for a given NT book. If you are working with the text of the NT, this really is essential material to consult. If there are significant issues with the early witnesses for a section of text you’re working with, it will likely be discussed in this book.

In light of Rick’s review, I am all the more happy to have contributed to part II and I am sure co-bloggers Pete and Pete say the same:

5. The Early Text of Matthew , Tommy Wasserman
6. The Early Text of Mark , Peter Head
7. The Early Text of Luke , Juan Hernandez
8. The Early Text of John , Juan Chapa
9. The Early Text of Acts , Christopher Tuckett
10. The Early Text of Paul (and Hebrews) , James R. Royse
11. The Early Text of the Catholic Epistles , J. K. Elliott
12. The Early Text of Revelation , Tobias Nicklas
13. Where Two or Three Are Gathered Together: Evaluating Agreements between Two or More Early Versions , Peter Williams